For more than 20 years in employment relations, industrial relations and HR, Adrian Tocker has been called into organisations to help solve workplace problems. Across different industries, ownership structures and workforces, one issue appears more consistently than almost any other:

Workplace Attendance and Productivity: The HR Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About.

It is one of the most common frustrations raised by managers, business owners and executives – from manufacturing operators who build additional labour into rosters to team leaders constantly reorganising shifts to cover absences.

Many absences are genuine. Some arise from illness, injury, caring responsibilities or other personal circumstances.

Whatever the cause, the operational reality remains the same.

Organisations can only deliver products and services when people are available to do the work.

What is the real cost of workplace absenteeism?

Public debate often centres on labour shortages and vacancies.

Healthcare provides a useful example. We regularly hear that hospital emergency departments are under pressure because there are not enough staff. But in any service operating close to capacity, vacancies are not the only availability issue that matters.

When demand is already high, every absence has a magnified impact.

Each unavailable employee places additional pressure on those who remain.

Why workplace attendance is an employee and a leadership problem.

Earlier in my career, I was involved in helping a large industrial operation address a long-standing attendance and timekeeping challenge.

Like many organisations, there were concerns about unplanned absences, employees arriving late, leaving early and inconsistent attendance patterns. Just as importantly, there were ongoing debates about whether the underlying information could be trusted.

Senior leadership recognised that as long as the conversation remained focused on debating the validity of the data, very little attention was being given to actually improving attendance and timekeeping performance.

Management, employees and unions worked together to establish agreed measures, transparent reporting and clear expectations. Supervisors and managers received regular information about attendance and timekeeping within their teams and were expected to investigate and address anomalies promptly.

Frontline leaders were held accountable for consistently following up with employees, understanding the reasons for issues, addressing concerns early and ensuring attendance and timekeeping expectations were being actively managed.

The results were significant. Attendance improved. Timekeeping improved. Productivity improved. Engagement improved.

Once attendance and timekeeping became visible leadership responsibilities, many of the recurring problems began to reduce.

Too often, attendance is treated as an employee problem when it is actually a leadership issue.

Why workplace attendance impacts performance.

If leaders cannot effectively manage whether people turn up for work when they are supposed to, start on time, remain available for their shift and address recurring patterns when they arise, what confidence should we have that they can manage the more complex question of performance once employees are at work?

That may sound blunt. But attendance and timekeeping are basic tests of management accountability. They require clear expectations, reliable information, consistent follow-up and the willingness to deal with issues early. Those are the same disciplines required to manage productivity, performance, engagement and culture.

If those disciplines are missing at the attendance and timekeeping level, they are unlikely to suddenly appear when the conversation shifts to productivity.

Leaders spend significant time discussing culture, engagement, development and performance. Those things are important.

But organisations sometimes overlook a fundamental reality:

People have to be available before any of those things can occur.

Attendance is not the whole answer to performance, but it is often the starting point.

Is workplace attendance affecting New Zealand’s productivity?

New Zealand’s productivity challenge has been debated for decades.

The productivity issue is real. Stats NZ’s latest productivity statistics show that, in the measured sector, labour productivity rose only 0.8 percent in the year ended March 2025, while multifactor productivity fell 0.9 percent and capital productivity fell 3.0 percent. That does not prove attendance is the cause. It does suggest we should look harder at all the things that affect how much work is actually performed, including whether people are consistently available to do it.

Numerous explanations are offered. Geography. Capital investment. Technology adoption. Management capability. Infrastructure. Market size.

All of those factors undoubtedly play a role.

But I cannot help wondering whether workplace attendance and timekeeping deserve more attention than they currently receive.

Since Covid-19, sick leave utilisation has increased, legal sick leave entitlements have increased, and expectations around flexibility have evolved. People are balancing work, family and personal commitments in ways that were less common even a decade ago. The 2025 Southern Cross Health Insurance and BusinessNZ Workplace Wellness study gives that experience some context: average absence rose to 6.7 days per employee in 2024, up from 5.5 days in 2022, and the median annual cost of absence for a typical employee rose to $1,319.

That cost is not theoretical. Southern Cross Health Insurance and BusinessNZ estimated the wider economic burden of absence at $4.17 billion, with average absence rising to 6.7 days per employee in 2024. Presenteeism is also being measured, with Umbrella’s 2025 wellbeing research suggesting that employees working while unwell operate well below their peak performance. Timekeeping is harder to quantify nationally, but employers see the cost directly in overtime, replacement labour, missed production, disrupted service delivery and managers spending time reorganising work that should already have been covered.

Those realities matter.

At the same time, organisations across virtually every sector continue to tell remarkably similar stories about managing attendance and timekeeping challenges.

When absenteeism becomes an accepted feature of workplace culture rather than an exception, the impact on productivity, customer service, workload allocation and team performance is hard to avoid.

Have we become so focused on explaining workplace absence that we have stopped expecting attendance?

This article reflects personal observations from more than two decades working in employment relations, industrial relations and HR. It is intended to encourage discussion about the role workplace attendance and timekeeping play in organisational performance, productivity and workplace culture, rather than to offer definitive conclusions about causes or solutions.